The big news this week – we are getting set up for our Second Annual Launch Party (which is essentially a fun way for us to demo all of the cool work we have been doing over the summer)! We will be demonstrating our work with digital books, plus creating a few analog specimens in the process. The event will take place at our headquarters on 246 Sixth Street in Port Orford, OR, over Labor Day Weekend. If you are in the area, please drop by. It will be fun!

The primary agenda item for this #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday was syncing up on “The Sugar Solution.” As we reported last week, we were thinking that modifying the GIAB activity might be the best route to go – but as we delved deeper into the problem, we discovered that offering a straight-forward HTML/CSS solution in the XO default browser from the SoaS stick itself solved all manner of technical problems. For one thing, it does not overload the Journal with the entire index of the bundle. It also enables us to repurpose the design solutions that we are already addressing in our web user interface. Recycling is good, even on the web! We still think that the idea of building this into Sugar is a “Very Good Idea (TM)” and should be pursued … and we plan to look at it in the future.

We are also taking a look at our overall collection. We want to maximize the distribution of material throughout categories that may be of interest to kids. We currently have categories that have 800+ items that may (or may not) hold a child’s interest. We would prefer to have more categories available in this sample collection. We are not librarians (as we mentioned going into this), so we are going to invite some of our area experts to participate in possibly helping us polish the basic material. We also have had a very generous offer of over 600+ new digital books for our target collection that are not available in the IACL. We are working out the details, so more news on that as it develops. We will need to fold those books into our existing categories, and perhaps even add a few more to our existing collection. Everything will be available via the web, either through us or through the original source, but the stick has limitations. Our current limitations are 8G.

Ideally, we want to automate the process of creating customized bundles – but that is another challenge to be met on another day!

We had an incredibly productive week at RDC headquarters this week, working remotely and on-site. James Simmons, author of the View Slides 8 and Get Internet Archive Books 2 (GIAB) Activities for Sugar contributed his considerable knowledge and expertise in this area. Via email, we brainstormed the best approach for making these books accessible – what we are trying to do is unique, in that we are trying to provide a completely offline solution so that children without an Internet connection can enjoy these books. The GIAB program that Jim has written is the online equivalent of what we are trying to do. Ideally, we would like to author our own Activity, but it just makes sense to build on a good code base and tap into a knowledgeable resource. That is how the Internet and open source works.

We have learned that it is not feasible to create a content bundle with too many items because it simply overloads the memory of the XO when it attempts to load all of the contents of the index into the Journal. As a matter of fact, 5 – 20 MB is the recommended bundle size, which is ridiculous when you are dealing with the DjVu or PDF format (Epub, of course, is another kettle of fish – but we will get to that later). There could only be 1-2 books per bundle which (needless to say) would make browsing the collection quite difficult. So, we are looking into methods to either extract a single book from a bundle or store them on the stick as individual files using GIAB as the interface to navigate the collection. Jim even suggested that what we are creating aren’t technically bundles and should perhaps have a different name altogether – such as “Children’s Library Archive”. Jim created a branch for us on github and we will be taking a close look at his code to see what is possible.

We are also making great progress on the web user interface and that will begin to come together in the next week or so. Levi has been developing mockups for browsing the collections, and creating an icon set reflecting the different categories. We want to make it as easy as possible for a user to view the book online or download and install the book onto their XO. We are also looking at AJAX libraries and the best tool to collect the metadata – Open Library API versus Internet Archive Advanced Search.

We view all of this as a work in progress – and have created plenty of work to challenge us in mentoring programs to come!